A new Lafayette Parish School System initiative could be good news for parents who were previously disappointed when their kindergartner was not chosen for the French immersion program. There are almost always more applicants than there are spots in the popular program, so students are chosen by lottery.

But now, there is a move afoot to create a late-entry immersion program that would allow students to enter the program in fifth grade.

It sounds like a good plan that could benefit older students who want to become fluent in a new language, as well as a way to help expand French immersion into the higher grades.

So far, 10 families have applied to join the late-entry immersion program, said Nicole Boudreaux, world language specialist for the Lafayette Parish School System. Twenty-five are needed to make the program a reality — but it's not too late. Applications will be accepted until mid-May, Boudreaux said.

By now, the benefits of being bilingual, especially for students who attend classes that are conducted in a foreign language, are well known. Immersion students score higher on standardized tests than their single-language counterparts, both in math and English language arts. There is an advantage to being able to think in more than one language.

The conventional wisdom has been to accept mostly kindergarten students into language immersion and occasionally, first-graders. That's because the younger a child is, the more readily they learn a language.

Beginning in kindergarten, all French immersion classes are taught exclusively in French — except for English language arts. But for older students learning the language for the first time, a slightly different approach will be used.

"In early immersion, there's no English at all," Boudreaux said. "In late immersion, we'll piggyback on their native language."

There will be other differences. To be accepted for the early language immersion program, all that is necessary is an application and the luck of the draw. For late immersion, students will be screened for their motivation to be in the program, their study habits and their proficiency in English language arts. That's because they will face a greater challenge than the younger students. Not only will learning a new language be a less natural process, their classes will have more content — and more complex content.

Challenging, but possible, Boudreaux said.

Creating a late-entry immersion class will not only help to fulfill the foreign-language dreams of parents and students, it will also help to build a larger pool of students who are interested in continuing in language immersion into high school.

But for now, the main goal seems to be to offer language immersion to students who moved to the district after they were too old to qualify for the existing program or who were not chosen in a lottery.

Boudreaux said if there is not enough interest generated by the May deadline, "… then we'll try again next year."

We hope the students who want the language immersion experience don't have to wait that long."